Concept inventory (CI) development in higher education is an active research area. As evaluation instruments, the validity and reliability of CIs should be important considerations, particularly as these tools become integral parts of individual, department, or programmatic assessments. While methods used to establish validity and reliability vary, most researchers agree that qualitative data analysis is a necessary prerequisite to writing meaningful questions. The CI's strength as a proxy for conceptual understanding depends upon the link between inventory content and ideas held by the testing population. Most commonly, CI developers utilize qualitative data about student alternative conceptions to write incorrect response options and to check student intentions with think-alouds; less frequent use of qualitative data to write question stems also occurs. The Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) was developed in the early 2000s in response to a growing need for a widely applicable assessment tool. The instrument is grounded in student data, following earlier efforts in other disciplines, albeit with significant modification. As with earlier efforts, semistructured interviews probed student thinking about foundational ideas in geology and were used to craft inventory questions following protocols for survey development and psychometric analysis. These common qualitative foundations for CI development have been discussed in the CI literature extensively; the significant role that qualitative data play in the question review and revision process has not been considered. This paper explores the importance of qualitative data in question development itself, providing a detailed unpacking of the review and revision process for an exemplar case.

Abstract Caves are naturally occurring underground voids. They occur in many types of rocks in many ecosystems. Common types of caves include solutional (karst) caves, lava tubes, sea caves, talus caves, regolith caves (formed by soil piping) and glacier caves (ice-walled caves). Caves range in size from only a few meters long to over 100 km long; the longest known cave, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, is 580 km long. They also vary considerably in complexity, depth, volume, number of entrances, and many other fundamental parameters. A concept closely related to solutional caves is karst. Karst is a landscape that forms through the dissolution of soluble rock. The most common soluble rock types are limestone and dolomite. Other types of soluble rock that form karst include marble, various evaporates (e.g., gypsum, anhydrite, and halite), and occasionally sandstone or quartzite. Karst landscapes are characterized by internal drainage, losing streams, sinkholes, caves, and springs. Karst is a prevalent landscape; ~20% of the United States is karst. Veni et al. (2001) provides a good introduction to karst. Books such as Moore and Sullivan (1997) and Gillieson (1996) provide somewhat more detailed, but still easily understood discussions of the subject. Caves are significant, non-renewable, geological resources. They are significant in their own right and also because they house other significant resources including geological resources (mineral deposits, paleontological remains, etc), biological resources (cave adapted and/or dependent microbiology, invertebrates, and vertebrates), and cultural resources (archaeological, historical, religious, and cultural materials, remains, and

Abstract Slope movements, including types of landslides and extremely slow soil creep ( Varnes, 1978 ), occur throughout the United States and within many national parks. The collection of vital signs of regional landslide information, referred to as monitoring, is not only scientifically useful, but is beneficial for assessment of landslide hazards and risk, which is in turn important for regional operations and planning. Different types of slope movement, such as fall, topple, slide, spread, and flow, can occur in a variety of materials and degrees of slopes. Specific types of landslides ( Fig. 1 ), such as rockfall, earth slump, and debris flow, can occur depending upon the types of geologic materials and movement ( Cruden and Varnes, 1996 ). A landslide can be caused by one or more of several factors, of which geological, morphological, physical, and human factors are the most common. The term landslide trigger refers specifically to an external stimulus, such as intense rainfall, rapid snowmelt, earthquake, volcanic eruption, or stream or coastal erosion. These stimuli initiate an immediate or near-immediate landslide movement by rapidly increasing shear stresses or porewater pressures, by ground acceleration due to seismic activity, by removing lateral support, by reducing the strength of slope materials, or by initiating debris-flow activity. Most landslides with recognized triggers are caused by precipitation: rainfall, snow meltwater, or combinations of both. In rock masses, rain and meltwater penetrate joints and produce hydrostatic pressures. In soils, the increase of pore-water pressures reduces shear resistance ( Schuster and Wieczorek, 2002 ).